Recent JDK Features Ease Web Service Development

XML-based remote calls are a key Web services technology. The Java API for XML-based RPC (JAX-RPC) 2.0 is the second-generation XML-based RPC Java standard. Currently in early draft review in the JCP as JSR 224, JAX-RPC 2.0 promises to vastly simplify RPC-based Web service development. Part of that ease results from new JDK 1.5 features, such as annotations and the concurrency API. This article reviews key JAX-RPC 2.0 features, and highlights how taking advantage of recent additions to Java make JAX-RPC 2.0 a more flexible API.

With a myriad of new Java features currently winding their way through the Java Community Process (JCP), many proposed technologies and APIs may appear at first as extra "fluff," threatening to make Java overly complex. After all, you've been writing Java code for years—how could learning those new APIs possibly make your life easier?

A deeper look at some new JSRs, however, reveals that sometimes more is less: Some new and proposed APIs enable us to write less code, chiefly by automating a lot of tedious work. The effort of learning those new Java features pays dividends by making us more productive. In this article, I will show how new JDK 1.5 features, such as annotations and the concurrency API, can make writing Java web services much simpler.